Guide to scalable
Hybrid Cloud Monitoring

Businesses across the world are continuously changing their technology stacks and implementing new cloud resources to achieve results. However, before bringing something that drives seamless customer experience they need to connect, standardize, and have a complete view of their application landscape. So, organisations start adopting Hybrid infrastructure which means an environment with an interconnected set of tools that enables users to develop, secure, and govern the flow of the message across different systems and data stores. A hybrid scenario will bring new possibilities and challenges to businesses.

With the evolution of multiple cloud technologies, the Hybrid landscape changed significantly, and it is getting difficult for organisations to ensure that they can monitor a hybrid cloud, and identify and solve issues promptly. With Microsoft products and Cloud Platform Azure, the messaging environment can consist of BizTalk Server, Service Bus, Logic Apps, and API Management. To efficiently support a hybrid integration environment, you will need to have a process in place to identify who is responsible for what issue and can solve it.

An integration (messaging) environment can be a set up to support on-premises connections to various other systems and their message exchange or a hybrid set up including communication with Software as a Service (SaaS) and Azure services like Service Bus or Blob Storage. Moreover, the environment could consist of an integration broker product like BizTalk server, which through its adapters can communicate with on-premises Line-of-Business (LOB) systems like SAP, and Microsoft Azure by using, for instance, the Service Bus Adapter.


With an integration environment in place, it is most likely that it is a critical component in the enterprise architecture. Furthermore, the message exchange between systems and possibly the Cloud will need to be up and running 24/7. Hence, the health of such an environment must be in good shape and be sustainable. Therefore, any issue has to be dealt quickly and with minimal impact on the business.

Talking about performance health and issues, we should consider the most important part and that is application Monitoring. It is imperative for an organization to know their environment and if it is a hybrid setup the boundaries and requirements are even higher. It brings another level of complexity in monitoring the flow of an application. There is quite a lot that we can observe:

• flow logs in the cloud
• network packets
• device logs
• agents and APIs, etc.

Adding cherry on top of the already complex multi-cloud monitoring cake is different types of cloud setup which is Public and Private cloud which means working on the rented and owned property.
An organization can collect application performance data, infrastructure, network data, etc. but when everything is spread diversely across the various platforms, it is hard to find out where the root cause is and troubleshoot quickly.

While cloud computing offers enterprises many benefits, it also poses several monitoring and management challenges. There are different points of failure and since it is a hybrid setup it means that handling performance and other issues might be a nightmare. Given the heterogeneous nature of the modern cloud environment, it is difficult to pinpoint the problem:

• Most infrastructures involve multi-cloud, multi-tier systems: application, databases, virtualization, storage, network, etc. Any issue in one tier affects other tiers—making the root-cause diagnosis a challenge.
  
  
• Cloud environments involve multiple domains of control—one for infrastructure, another for applications, etc. The cloud visibility gap makes performance monitoring difficult.
  
  
  
• The public cloud infrastructure is shared and has loaded multiple customers. The rise in demand from one customer’s workload can affect the performance of applications for another customer.

Read more about cloud monitoring solutions and challenges in "The five key challenges of monitoring a BizTalk, Azure or hybrid integration environment” article.

Monitoring a complex hybrid environment needs a comprehensive cloud monitoring tool that provides you with a complete picture of your environment.

Monitoring tools are essential to be productive in finding the cause of issues in a BizTalk, Azure, or hybrid environment, and quickly solving them. Without the use of any monitoring software, it can be laborious and time-consuming to find the root cause of an issue and resolve it effectively.

Fortunately, there are tools available to help the BizTalk or Azure administrator, database administrator, and infrastructure specialists.

Microsoft offers a variety of native tools. However, while these tools are useful for the basic monitoring, they often lack capabilities for notifications, reporting, or web accessibility.

Thankfully we have other possibilities hybrid monitoring. Hybrid monitoring applications collect data from assets across the hybrid environment into a single centralized location/app. They monitor systems metrics like CPU and memory usage, disk space, and I/O, and server metrics like response time, number of requests, and application metrics like message count, suspended messages, message throttling, etc.

AIMS is an AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) solution for monitoring and alerting – on-premises, hybrid, or cloud. AIMS supports 200+ technologies such as Azure, Logic Apps, BizTalk, ServiceBus, SQL, IIS, AWS and Windows Server. AIMS is an ideal fit for support, devops and other technical teams, dealing with hybrid, cloud and on-prem environments.

AIMS provides scalable performance and health monitoring, analytics, anomaly detection and topology discovery - all powered up by the AI engine. With algorithms, anomalies in an environment can be detected and aid in the quick diagnosis of the potential risks to the health of the environment.

AIMS builds a topological mapping of technologies your business runs on. These maps are dynamic – they automatically generate and update in real-time to reflect any changes made to an environment – and provide oversight over both on-prem and cloud components in a single view. AIMS users can click on a component in the map to drill down into detailed analytics, performance, and health data on that specific component.

AIMS can also be used to create custom reports for any environment, system, component, parameter, or transaction with complete freedom to combine information from many cloud solutions. AIMS provides visual dashboards using ready-made components that can be customized to communicate critical data to both technical and non-technical stakeholder groups.